It is easy for leftist intellectuals to condescend to President Trump; the man says he does not read books, and as we all know, he can be pretty crude besides. How amusing it is, ...

What do the pasts of India and China imply about their futures? 2018’s rapid advances in the race sciences, as exemplified by Harvard geneticist David Reich’s blockbuster book ...

Whatever else may be said about Marxism, it provided (for those who needed it) an eschatological philosophy in a post-religious world. It served more than one psychological ...

The editorial standards at The Atlantic, as I demonstrated a little while back in my essay for New English Review on contributing editor Ian Bogost, are certainly exceptional. On ...

“Hangover cure”—like military intelligence—is an oxymoron. If hangovers could be cured, they wouldn’t exist. Maybe one day it will happen, and some penicillin of the ...

Perhaps Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby’s rival for Daisy’s affections, wasn’t totally wrong after all? Countless articles about how unscientifically racist old WASPs were begin by ...

There is a lot to be learned from conceiving of people as vehicles of ideas. For ideas, whether right or wrong, good or bad, well understood or misunderstood, guide our conduct ...

There have long been complaints about crime—the quality of it, I mean, not the quantity. It seems so sordid and ordinary these days by comparison with the past. The passage of ...

The most amusing aspect of the impressive, if not particularly comic, new comedy The Death of Stalin is that Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development), who earns most of the film’s ...

Word reached me that Friends—the anodyne ’90s “sitcom”—has riled the snowflakes. Its transgression is that it meets Stendhal’s definition of fiction: to be a mirror ...

I have too much respect for music to sing myself, as my voice is such that it makes the average crow sound like Fischer-Dieskau. It is not that I am tone-deaf; on the contrary, I ...

What if the world isn’t about to blow up? What if most everything is slowly getting better and better? Would there be nothing to worry about then? The new book by Harvard ...

I would make a very bad bodyguard—not that it has ever been my ambition to be one. I would be useless not merely because I am incapable of fighting, but because I am not ...

Stalin famously had a buzzer installed to let his sweating henchmen know when it was finally safe to stop applauding the Great Leader without fear of being sent to the Gulag. In ...

Of recent months, several children of friends of mine have asked my help in preparing what they call a personal statement in their application for a job or place at university. ...

A Moment in Time reminded me of English women expatriates I had met in the South of France more than fifty years ago. They were very proud of being British, never tired of telling ...